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January 03, 2005
Magnitudes
The latest number dead is just about 1350.
This is the cost in American soldiers lives for the liberation of Iraq. Not long ago, I said this was a small number. Since my comments don't work very well, I can't tell how many people wanted to call me an insenstive so and so, but I imagine it would be a significant fraction.
This week, we Americans have been struggling with another number of dead. It is somewhere in the tens of thousands. The last time I checked, it was around 144,000 human lives. This is a tragedy of immense proportions.
The difference is that nobody is responsible. There is no evildoer named 'Sue Nami' that we can hunt down and bring to justice, despite all the jokers who say so. It's just nature.
It's odd that even though nobody has any precise numbers, a very clear set does arise. Every major newspaper on the planet is within 5% of the others as they do their jobs, presumeably as responsibly as possible. Somehow, despite the lack of sophisticated communications in what are putatively very primative places, the death toll is reliably reported. I bring this up for a number of reasons, none of which is particularly jolly this New Year's Eve. But it strikes me that when it has come to putting a figure on the number of civilian casualties, a particular number which the anti-war crowd finds singularly important. But there are no reliable figures.
As readers of Michael Crighton know, this particular disaster, a huge tsunami, is precisely the kind of event that environmental terrorist had indeed planned to kick off - at least in fiction. The coincidence between the publication of this book and the actual event is one of those freak occurances that people's minds try to makes sense of. We are pattern-recognizing machines, we humans. Speaking of which, there is a real conspiracy theory out there about this tsunami being man-made. So don't doubt that people are willing to take great leaps of faith into the unknown and say there are definite answers when there are not.
Anyway, I know this is a sloppy post. But I just wanted to smack people around a little bit, who think Rumsfeld is so bloody evil.
BTW, here's another decent comparison.
Posted by mbowen at January 3, 2005 12:13 PM
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Tracked on January 3, 2005 01:09 PM
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Ricky
Posted by: Ricky at January 3, 2005 05:09 PM
Death is always a horrible thing, especially for the survivors. How do you deal with a daddy or mommy who isn't going to come back? At the personel level it overwhelms.
But 1350 is a cheap price to pay for what has been done. Note that I don't say if 'the invasion' in Iraq is good or bad, just that the butcher's bill has been cheap.
Posted by: brian at January 4, 2005 06:01 AM